Together For The Gospel 2010: Session #1

Mark Dever

The Church Is The Gospel Made Visible

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To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord...
Ephesians 3:8-11 (emphasis added)

We begin with one question to open our time together: How do our churches make the gospel visible?

How many of our churches are of use to the gospel? Or how many of our churches would be of better use to the gospel if they were simply not there?

We can advance the gospel by our life together as a church. Or we can do damage to the gospel by our life together as a church.

How does the local church display the great truths about the gospel, about God, about Christ, about humanity, about our response?

Nothing that follows is to diminish the verbal nature of the gospel. God’s Word is where the gospel is set forth clearly. But the church reflects and clarifies the gospel for the people around us.

1) How is God’s nature and character displayed in the church?

• His holiness – distinct lives point to a distinct God. The lives of the members of our congregation should be marked by the holiness of God. For example, the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5). Are our churches marked by holiness? Or do we just say that our churches are churches for “sinners”? There is a difference between sinners and repenting sinners. Those demonstrations of repentance are what reflect God’s holiness. Satan wants us to think of holiness as bondage but in reality holiness is freedom. We are to be a community that reflects a life that the rest of humanity dreams of.

• His love – we are to be distinct from the world by the kind of love we have for others despite the inconvenience it may be to us. If we don’t have this kind of love in our churches, we are just like another club.

• His authority – David’s last words (2 Samuel 23:3-4) show us that authority is a good and life giving thing. Ever since the Fall, Satan has been trying to tempt us to think otherwise. He wants us to think that love and authority can’t go together (e.g. Satan wants Adam and Eve to believe God can’t love them by forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). But God can love us and rule us and correct us because He’s trustworthy. When we affirm and yet are willing to gently correct each other, it reflects the goodness of God’s authority. God has rights to authority over us not only in creation but especially in having bought us by the blood of Christ. Authority matters a lot because authority abused tells a lie about who God is. Do our churches show the world around us something better about God’s authority? Through our lives together in the church, we want others to see Satan’s lie about authority (that it’s a bad thing) for what it really is…a lie.
  

2) How is the truth about human beings displayed in the church?

• We reflect the value of human beings because they are made in God’s image. This should be reflected by relationships in our communities that cross natural boundaries that would otherwise separate us. A local church is not for people of one occupation, or for college students, or for any one demographic, but to reflect that all human beings of every diverse kind are all made in the image of God.

• We reflect the teaching and understanding that we are totally depraved. The church is not an assembly of the self righteous. Is our church a community in which people are seeking to be righteous in themselves or where people acknowledge that we’re all sinful? Is our church one that demonstrates humility? This has many implications. We should not be afraid to use the law to show that we are all sinners, both those who are lost and those who are saved. A good understanding of depravity sets us up to explain church membership because we show that we’re not done with this earthly journey when we’re first saved. Our churches should not give the sense that we’re all completely done and OK in this life. We should not only give a clear verbal explanation of the gospel but we should show by our lives that we really believe and understand our need for it. We should be a church that openly confesses our sins to each other. Everyone in the world knows that something is not right and we are the ones in all the world who can tell them the reason why. And non-believers shouldn’t just see this reflected in their individual relationships with Christians but in the way the believers within a church relate to one another.
  

3) How is the truth about Jesus Christ displayed in the church?

• Jesus is invisible to us right now, but the church is the community in which this unique God-man is in a metaphoric sense made visible in His person. We are His body. We are His temple. We’re filled with His Spirit. Unless we live this out, Christ won’t be made known.

• Our lives should display not only Christ’s person but Christ’s work. We are forgiving because Christ has forgiven us. We can be humble because we know we’ve received much grace through Jesus. We love others because we have received God’s love through Jesus. The main way we demonstrate that we love God is through our love for others. We know God has loved us not just because He has created us but because He has loved us through buying us with the blood of Christ. We should show the kind of love for each other in our churches that confuses the categories of the world around us so that they interrogate us and we can tell them about how we’ve all been brought together: people from every tribe, tongue, and nation through the blood of Christ. We should be churches that show the world how Christ breaks down all of our barriers, especially generational ones. We should especially seek in our churches to remove generational segregation. We should seek in our churches to remove denominational segregation. We can pray for and partner with other churches that don’t agree with us about everything but agree with us about the gospel. This is how we show the work of Christ. This is what we want to show. Unless we live like this, the cross, matter how correctly it’s taught, remains only an abstract idea.

• Part of the way we help the gospel not to be adjusted is by having healthy local churches.
  

4) How is the right response of the gospel displayed in the church?

• Our churches are to both teach and model repentance. We make clear our need for grace. We personally confess and turn from our sin. We repent of our selfishness. The Christian life is personal but it’s not private. We are to repent and witness repentance in each other.

• Our churches are to both teach and model faith. We are all acting on things that we cannot see. We are acting on promises that God has made to us, promises that He holds out for the future yet which are to shape our lives in the present. We should hold out God’s promises again and again so that we can call forth each other to believe by faith. We can’t find a time in our Christian lives when God’s promises have not been true to us and for us. That’s why we make central the preaching of the Word, because we are certain of God’s promises, and it’s only through His Word that we come into contact with His promises.
  

Do we see how Jesus’ plan for evangelism is the local church? Do we want to be better in our evangelism? Then we need to work on growing as a church to be what Jesus meant for us to be. The church is the appearance of the gospel in the world. Christians, not just as individuals, but as God’s people bound together in purpose are the clearest picture of who God is and what His will is for our lives. The church is the pattern for God’s work and the means that He uses to bring about His glory. We need to ask ourselves, “What kind of gospel is my local church making visible?”